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Home but Still Haunted
Trinette Johnson of Clinton, who has post-traumatic stress disorder, served in Iraq with the D.C. National Guard: "It's almost like I'm there but I'm not there sometimes."
(Andrea Bruce - The Washington Post)
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The comments upset her because they implied a choice she did not have. She was a National Guard soldier, a job she took in 1997 as a steppingstone to more financial stability at a time when she was a single mother of three. The Iraq war did not seem a possibility then. Her father had served 26 years as a guardsman without seeing battle.
In 2003, Johnson left for war as her youngest was learning to talk.
Her eldest daughter was nearly 12 when Johnson returned. The girl seemed different -- dressing in black, skipping school, no more smiles, no hugs. She wondered: Was it because of her absence?
She recalled, "I'm looking and I'm trying to figure out, 'Where is my child?' "
* * *
Even now, there are times Johnson feels uncomfortable talking about post-traumatic stress disorder. It's an invisible wound in a war with daily bloodshed. At Walter Reed, she said, she saw soldiers with missing arms or legs, paralysis, shrapnel scars.
She is not so physically injured.
Still, her diagnosis scares her.
It took her six months after she left Walter Reed to make herself go to a VA office and stay for an appointment. She put it off at first, then became overwhelmed by the sight: veterans with glazed looks, some seeming at loose ends with nothing else to do.
"I would see some of the older vets sitting there," she recalled, "and I would be like, 'Lord, have mercy. I do not want that to be me.' "
She gave up alcohol. Some veterans drink a lot, she said, and she does not want to "self-medicate," as she called it. "It doesn't make Iraq go away," she said. "But obviously, if you pass out, then there's nothing bothering you at that time."
